[Python-Dev] Python Library Support in 3.x (Was: email package status in 3.X) (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Jun 19 13:34:41 CEST 2010

anatoly techtonik writes:

I do not know what are you intending to do, but my opinion that fund raising for patching library is a waste of money.

Of course it's not a waste of money. The need is real, so as long as the PSF and other organizations (GSoC) choose reasonable projects/ people to support, progress will be steady. Merely the sense that real resources are flowing into the stdlib from outside the volunteer core will encourage more volunteers as well.

PSF should concentrate on enhancing tools to make lives of library supporters easier. I do not want to become a maintainer,

Well, the current maintainers, while not yet happy with the state of the infrastructure, have been steadily engaged in improving it by adding features that have consensus support. But getting consensus support is not easy.

Eg, I thought that with three plausible candidates, of which Mercurial was obviously satisfactory (although I preferred git, myself, and a at least couple people advocated Bazaar strongly), a switch to a dVCS was a no-brainer. It wasn't. Several people opposed it strongly until it became clear that in theory at least it would require no changes to current workflow (although I think most of those developers will find much to like about the changes Mercurial will bring). And even now implementation is hanging up on the requirement that it not affect Windows-based developers adversely ... and it turns out that even being Python-based is nowhere near enough to guarantee that, but rather it requires further effort before that will become reality -- and it's not forthcoming from the Mercurial developers, who unsurprisingly like Mercurial enough to deal with the minor flaws.

IMO, if you want to improve the infrastructure, you need to work on getting consensus behind a few of your proposals, rather than making one after another and not following up with code or a PEP.

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